Printing

[xadrian]

Printing will be done to an 8.5x5.5 booklet. (8.5x11 folded in half)

Art is done on Blue Line boards. There is one line, nothing says Bleed, Trim or Copy. All art is inside this single line.

Cover art is also done on Blue Line Cover board, art extends to the dotted Bleed line.

There is 14 pages of art, 2 pages of extra material, and cover.

Questions

1) When scanning, in order to get best quality for printing, scan at 300 dpi or 600?

2) When croping off extra image, crop to full size of paper?

3) Removing blue lines. Is it best to change Mode to CMYK, drop the cyan, change back to greyscale then use Curves to adjust contrast?

4) Image size. Files will be sent to printer. Is there a layout ideal to send to minimize their work? ie an image 8.5x11 with two pages? 17x11 with four?

5) Saving. Should Image size and Print size be the same? Is there a good setting for saving before sending.

6) Should cover art be cropped to only include image? Should that image be the same Image/Print size as the interior pages? Need to know because some work is digital and requires no scanning. Need to know final size.

7) Will most printers know what I need if I just label the files "Page 1" "Cover" "Inside Back Cover" etc.?


That should do it. Thanks for any input.

[xadrian]

Well, I'll post what I'm doing, see how that stirs anyone.

I'm scanning 300 dpi

Croping to paper size, not image size

Dropping blue lines by changing mode to CMYK, deleting the Cyan channel, then coverting back to greyscale and using curves to adjust brightness and contrast. Seems to work best. (Of note, the only reason I ask this, is when I'm done, and if the white's are pure white, there are remnants of blue lines showing up like burned images)

Sending to printer a page at a time as 3000px high

Saving images as same size, not doing anything on Print size.

Cropping cover art at image, but resizing to 3000px as well. Matching any digital pages to same dimensions.

Carry on.

[Chris Piers]

Sounds like a good plan. 300 dpi should be just fine for the b&w art printed at such a small size on regular paper.

Fitting to paper size = good idea. I usually dump out the blue lines if any exist in the scanning/PhotoShopping stage. I scan it at 600dpi 'cuz I'm anal and in full color. Then I switch it to greyscale and hit ctrl+l to adjust the levels. Following that, I go in and erase any greyish lines/dots that exist from the blue guidelines.

Then I size to fit whatever I'm doin'.

[xadrian]

Originally posted by Chris Piers
'cuz I'm anal and in full color.

Can you actually be both? ;)

Thanks, that helps hearing someone say they actually do something.